Post-Purchase Marketing Strategy: 8 Tips on How to Stay in Touch With Customers And Boost CX

You’ve successfully marketed and sold your products or services to a new customer, providing them with a great customer journey. However, their experience with your business doesn’t end there. Post-purchase, businesses have the opportunity to continue to engage with customers, by staying in touch and further adding to the customer experience. 

But how do you make the most of post-purchase marketing, helping to retain customers and create a sense of loyalty to your brand? It doesn’t have to be difficult and it's likely your business already uses post-purchase marketing strategies. Instead, it’s a matter of using these in line with your customer service objective and continuing to show interest in your customers.

Here are eight tips for the post-purchase customer experience.

1. Thank Your Customers

As your first point of contact post-purchase, sending customers a message to thank them for purchasing your products is an important opportunity. Not only does this explicitly show that your customers are valued by the business, but thank you messages can also include other gestures or links to personalize the communication. This includes offering personalized discounts, introducing referral schemes, and sharing your social media and other online channels. 

2. Have a Clear Return Policy

According to 76% of shoppers, they would give repeat business to companies with a simple return process. Making your return policy clear is part of this, outlining when the deadline for returns is and including free returns postage. Also wording your returns policy in a way that makes sense reduces the possibility of confusion amongst customers. This allows customers to try out products first, and minimizes complaints regarding returns.

3. Provide Order Tracking

Customers like to know where their order is once they’ve placed it. Order tracking enables them to see where in the delivery process their products are. Automated order trackers are used for updating customers and providing exact delivery times. Likewise, when using external delivery or sales services, providing customers with tracking numbers and details surrounding the amazon fulfillment process, helps customers know when it will be delivered.

4. Include Product Descriptions and Instructions

Once your customer receives your product, including product descriptions and instructions can help your customer get to grips with your product more quickly. Rather than leaving them to guess, or assuming they will know how to use it, providing instructions makes it completely clear, as well as highlighting any differences between similar products. Also, product descriptions and instructions can be used to identify products that are broken or not working as they should.

5. Organize Your Customer Support

Inevitably, customers will need support with their products, whether learning how to use them, leaving feedback, or finding out about other products your business sells. Organizing your customer support enables your business to address customer questions and needs efficiently. Using call features such as call forwarding and routing, customers are put through to those with the appropriate knowledge to best provide support and resolve their queries. 

6. Respond to Customer Reviews

Both good and bad reviews are used by potential customers to inform their purchasing decisions and existing customers, building their customer lifetime value. Responding to reviews shows that the business values customer feedback. It also provides a chance to respond respectfully and transparently to negative reviews, acknowledging where mistakes were made and how your business plans to address this situation to prevent it from happening again.

7. Offer Loyalty Points

In building a customer base, customer retention is a crucial element of post-purchase marketing. Loyalty plans encourage repeat purchases from customers, retaining their interest and reengaging them with your products. These schemes can offer points per purchase, added bonuses for referring others to the brand, or provide discounts after a determined amount of purchases. This incentivizes customers to continue purchasing from you.

8. Remarketing

After your customer has purchased, use their data to remarket products to them. Using customer segmentation techniques, identify products similar customers also bought or were drawn to. Similarly, this highlights marketing campaigns and platforms most engaging to them, from email newsletters to an outbound call. This gives the customer personalized recommendations and marketing to encourage them to make repeat purchases.

Optimize Your Post-Purchase Marketing

Throughout the post-purchase, contacting and engaging with customers can improve their overall experience with your business. This can track customer orders, help them to understand their products, and retain their interest in your business. Using different strategies together can optimize your marketing, presenting your product and brand image well, alongside encouraging future business.

—Jenna Bunnell, Senior Manager, Content Marketing, Dialpad